Seeking Refuge – Lessons from the Past and Present for the Refugee Crises of the Future

The Interpolator, the Body-Archive, and the Spectral Observer: Uses of the Archives in Rithy Panh’s S21 trilogy

” Gender, Society, and Politics in 1945 – 1955 Cambodia”

The Life of the Buddha at Angkor

The Life of the Buddha at Angkor

Morality Mattered Buddhist-Socialism and the Fight Against Imperialism in 1955-1970

Ethnographic Research Method for Developing Intercultural Competence

Aesthetics and Representations of Cambodian Court Dance From The Time of French Protectorate, on 20th March, Phnom Penh

Public Lecture: “Bronze Drums of South-East Asia” at CKS Siem Reap

on 08 February 2018

Lecture in Phnom Penh: at RUPP on Monday 4th of December, 2017, at 2:00pm

Lecture in Phnom Penh: Tuesday August 31, 2017, at 6:00pm

Lecture Series

Description

The aim of the CKS lecture series is to provide a platform for scholars and development practitioners to present their research projects to engage with an academic audience as well as the wider public. The lecture series also showcases the work of CKS American, Cambodian, and French Senior Fellows who can present and discuss their research findings. Most of the time, lectures are presented at 6pm and late in the week in order to ensure the participation of scholars, full-time employees, university teachers, and students. The format includes a 45-minute presentation and a 30 to 45 minute question and answer session.

CKS has recently started to videotape its lectures to make them available to a greater public, subject to the presenter’s consent, via the Center’s website.

Lectures are held in Siem Reap or Phnom Penh. In Siem Reap, the venue is the CKS Conference Hall at Wat Damnak. In Phnom Penh, lectures take place at the Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA), unless specified otherwise. Most of the lectures in Phnom Penh are now organized in close partnership with the Human Sciences Encounters in Phnom Penh (HSEPP)/IRD (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement).

In this talk, Professor Jean Artarit will propose to recall the experience of terror under Democratic Kampuchea, by approaching it through the depths of the human psyche, dwelling on narcissistic phenomena observed among most revolutionaries. Pol Pot and Nuon Chea who are being in denial of their past involvement in the tragedy of the second half of the 1970s are the obvious cases in point.

Dr. Benny Widyono is a former senior United Nations diplomat from Indonesia who served in two capacities in Cambodia:

During the UNTAC period as an UNTAC “governor” in the province of Siemreap from 1992-1993 and

As the Political Representative of the United Nations Secretary General to the New Royal Government of Cambodia, 1994-97.

His talk will be based on his book entitled: Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, The Khmer Rouge and the United Nations in Cambodia which has been translated into Khmer by CKS. After the talk, a book signing will take place.

Geography in Cambodian Golden Age Music and the Diminishing of CambodgeBy Phally Chroy
Date: 26 th July 2016.

Abstract:

Geography in popular music of the Cambodian Golden Age helped rural and urban Cambodians engage with the country’s process of independence. Popular music of this era addressed provincial boundaries by affirming landscapes of Cambodia such as rivers and mountains that brought Cambodians towards a geographical awareness of “Srok Khmer.” In this presentation, Phally Chroy will present how the popular music of the Golden Age functioned as song-texts during the 1960s and 1970s by attaching shared social experiences and the concept of “land as nation.” This analysis will reveal the hidden spaces in which song-texts engage with notions of power, nation, and culture as Cambodia phased out of the Protectorate.

Phally Chroy is a Ph.D. candidate in Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University. His research covers Cambodia, cosmopolitanism, and critical theory.

Book presentation «The expert patients in their fight against AIDS in Cambodia»By Dr. Eve Bureau-Point, published in April 2016 with the Presses Universitaires de Provence
Date: 23 rd June 2016.

Abstract:

If you are interested in Cambodia, in its transformations, in the impact of international organizations’ presence, in the interactions between a vast network of socio-culturally diverse actors and between heterogeneous ways of acting and thinking? Therefore this book is for you. Based on an ethnographic study on the role, the meaning, the impacts, and the issues and contradictions inherent to the participation of « expert patients » in the fight against AIDS, this book shades lights onto the local interpretations of international norms and the challenges facing health democracy in Cambodia.

Eve Bureau-Point is a social anthropologist, post-doctoral fellow at the French Institute of Research for Development (UMR 216) who specializes in medical anthropology. Since 2005, she has been working on the patient’s expertise in health democracy. Her latest works deal with patient’s participation in research, the construction of lay knowledge, and self-medication in France and Cambodia.

Ethnicity and the Reformulation of Political Community in Khmer Chronicles of the Nineteenth Century By Matt Reeder, PhD candidate in the Department of History, Cornell University
Date: 09 th June 2016.

Abstract:

When did Cambodia begin to see itself as a Khmer kingdom? When did it start to consistently portray Ayutthaya and Bangkok as Thai kingdoms? Did it see Vietnam as Vietnamese? In this presentation of ongoing research, the appearances of ethnonyms such as “Khmer,” “Thai,” “Yuan,” and “Cham” are analyzed in a selection of Khmer chronicle texts dating from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. Looking at chronicles in both Khmer as well as contemporary Thai translation (of Khmer originals that are now lost), even by the beginning of the nineteenth century, references to the ethnicity of individuals or village-communities can be distinguished from references to “political ethnicity,” which gloss all the diverse subjects of a king as a single ethnic group. In short, we can see a transition from late eighteenth to mid nineteenth century chronicle compositions away from understandings of political relationships based mainly on personalized patron-client ties, and towards the use of ethnic categories to name kingdoms and narrate their historical and contemporary relations. This development only strengthened under the French protectorate and the influence of European-style nationalism. By paying close attention to the shifting patterns and implications of ethnic identifications in a range of nineteenth-century chronicle texts, this research offers some tentative answers to questions about changing conceptions of ethnicity and political community in pre-colonial and early colonial Cambodia.

Matt Reeder is a PhD candidate in the Department of History, Cornell University. His dissertation will trace innovations in the formulation and deployment of social categories, especially conceptions of ethnicity, in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Ayutthaya, Bangkok, Cambodia, and Chiang Mai. He completed his bachelor’s degree in history at Bowdoin College and his master’s in Southeast Asian studies at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa. He has spent the last two years conducting research in Bangkok, Phnom Penh, and Chiang Mai.

UN Leang, Ph.D. was educated in Cambodia, the Philippines and the Netherlands in philosophy and social and comparative education. He earned a Ph.D in Social and Behavioural Science from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 2012. Since 1995, he has been engaged in Cambodian higher education sub-sector in various capacity, at the institutional level as student, lecturer and director of education graduate program and at the system level as chief of research and innovation grant (Higher Education Quality and Capacity Improvement Project, funded by the World Bank), deputy director of Department of Higher Education and currently as deputy director general, general directorate of policy and planning, Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MoEYS). He is also a research fellow at Education Research Council, MoEYS. He was a senior research fellow at the Center for Khmer Studies, a former research fellow at Mekerere University, Uganda, and a visiting scholar at the Northern Illinois University, USA. His research interests, publications and teaching focus on (comparative) education policy and its contribution to national development; curriculum reform and development, and assessment and pedagogy.

Khieng Sothy, Ph.D. received Ph.D from VU University Amsterdam. Dr. Khieng has been working with CDRI as a researcher since 2008 and in 2015 appointed as head of Education Unit. Dr Khieng is the co-editor of the Cambodia Education 2015: Employment and Empowerment and has been involved specifically in researching the challenges and policy options on higher education, TVET and skills development. He has more than 10 years of development research experience with organizations in Cambodia, the United States, Netherlands and Australia. Beside education, he also publishes in public health, development economics, cross border trade and civil society sector.

Abstract:

The initial decades of Cambodia’s post-colonial history were tumultuous: less than two decades after independence in 1953, it was drawn into the Vietnam War, then descended into civil war (1970-75) before the notorious genocide (1975-1979) known as ‘Year Zero’. Subsequently, throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, the country experienced a second civil war. The 1991 Paris Peace Agreement marked a significant step towards turning the country from a socialist and communist ideology to democracy, from planned economy to a market economy and from isolation to regional and global integration. The end of civil war in the 1990s also meant the end of the socialist model of higher education supported by Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries.

Peace in Cambodia coincided with the post-Cold War intensification of globalization and the growing prevalence of market-based models for the provision of public goods. Under the influence of ‘neoliberal’ ideas, countries have come to see themselves as constantly under the threat of competition and yet attracted by the potential for benefits of open trade, market and investment. Within this context, higher education has been cast as one major key to enhancing national competitiveness, but also as a field itself subject to the laws of supply and demand, with institutions competing to attract student-consumers and commercial ‘clients’. While such an instrumentalist vision of higher education’s social role has come in for significant criticism in ‘developed’ Western countries, the challenges it poses for low-income countries with under-developed systems of tertiary education are particularly acute.

In many such countries, leading multi-lateral organisations as well as bilateral aid agencies have played a key role in disseminating models for higher education predicated on neoliberal orthodoxy. Cambodia is a prime example: especially since the late 1990s, while receiving substantial assistance from these organizations, it has undergone a rapid transition from elite to mass higher education, with a proliferation of institutions (HEIs) and rising student numbers. New private providers have been established, while marketization has seen public HEI’s forced to compete for students and derive more of their funding from user fees. The number of HEIs has increased from less than 10 to over 100, and student enrollments from about 1% to 16%.

This talk will focus on the process of policy formulation in the heavily aid-driven Cambodian higher education sector, asking who introduces these reforms and who benefits, but also what questions and voices are forgotten in that process. Specifically, it will seek to answer the following questions:

1. Who have been the key players in debate over HE policy in Cambodia since the 1990s?
2. What have been their agendas?
3. How and why has the relative influence of different stakeholders shifted over time?
4. What have been the implications for the construction of Cambodia’s higher education system to date?

These four interrelated questions will reveal the extent to which direction that recent reforms of higher education would bring Cambodia to in term (national) development. By examining whose voice is heard and whose voice is forgotten in defining the issues in higher education, I will examine the final development goal of higher education in term of economic growth and current global development agenda VS social justice and public good/public life.

Contested Memory, Documentary Registers, and Cambodian/American Histories of ViolenceBy Lina Chhun,a doctoral candidate and fifth year graduate student in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Date: 04 th March 2016.

Abstract:

Processes of remembrance and commemoration are highly fraught; how and what we remember are mediated, individually as well as collectively. Oftentimes, when we construct historical memory, we privilege what Veena Das (2007) calls “the event” of violence—a process that simultaneously makes an event historically legible while obscuring its conditions of emergence. Memory-making thus, is always punctuated by acts of forgetting, the creation and proliferation of silences that produce historical amnesias as they also produce, paradoxically perhaps, affective remnants—what Ngô, Nguyen, and Lam (2012) refer to as “the particular resonances of…wars, refugee archives of feeling, and the recursive traces of both” (673).

Foregrounding an Asian Americanist critique of empire, and deploying an analysis of exception(alism) as the central device in this exploration of what Yoneyama (1999) terms the dialectics of memory and the construction of historical narrative regarding Cambodia, Ms Chhun begins with an analysis of the unofficial register of her father’s oral history interview regarding the U.S. bombing of Neak Leung. She then transitions to a discussion regarding the relationship between archives and contested memories in the afterlife of violence, illustrating the possibilities of reading her father’s story as documentation alongside what she terms two “archival collections.” Analyzing how these cases differentially fulfill the traditional archival purposes of documentation, transparency, and accountability, she turns to an engagement with the ways in which these archives might function to produce different claims to “historical truth” in the afterlife of violence. In doing so, she addresses the following questions: How might we make historical silences legible without reproducing a regime of truth invested in discrete events of (spectacular) violence? And how might we also do so without reifying a narrative of (U.S.) exception(alism) that allows us to forget the ongoing violences of militarism and empire?

Trafficking and Protection: Two Reintegrative Pathways for Sexualized Cambodian Young Women

Abstract:

A sociological theory of ‘reintegration’ is proposed for Cambodian female victims of sex-trafficking and sexual violence and locally derived benchmarks for assessing reintegrative success. Employing Grounded Theory Methodology, 53 qualitative interviews were undertaken between August 2010 and May 2012. These explored the perspectives of formerly ‘reintegrated’ recipients of assistance and others they considered important to reintegration. Despite the range of competing perspectives identified, a convergence emerged upon the primacy of acceptance to reintegrative success, even as its achievement was divergently configured within modern-urban and traditional-collectivistic social milieu.

Two pathways to reintegration are therefore proposed, with significant implications for protection assistance. This grounded theory draws upon various resources including Honneth’s recognition framework, Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, Ledgerwood’s theorization of traditional Khmer feminine ideals, and Turner’s cosmopolitan conception of shared vulnerability. For these young women, a life lived with dignity chiefly depends upon access to either traditional or modernist forms of acceptance (or reciprocal recognition), offered in the light of cultural norms inherent to groups and social institutions.Click here to download the lecture slide

When discussing Pol Pot as the embodiment of a regime or Pol Pot as a person, most people in Cambodia would start by describing the atrocity of a regime under which about 1.7 million people perished violently from 1975 to 1979. Yet Pol Pot and his followers claimed that what they did was first and foremost to protect the nation: their crimes partly disguised behind the banner of their deep nationalistic sentiment.

In this talk, Mr. Keo argues that the nationalistic ideals of Pol Pot at the heart of the Democratic Kampuchea was an extreme form of Cambodian nationalism that resulted from the imagined threat of enemies – particularly from Vietnam – thereby leading to mass killing in the name of the nation. The “Yuon Invader” discourse was historically identified by the Khmer Rouge, as well as by Lon Nol, as one key element of this extreme form of nationalism. Interviews with former Khmer Rouge cadres, especially those who had worked closely with Pol Pot, and studies of the Khmer Rouge policy documents revealed the factor of mass killings that associated with the eradicating Vietnamese civilians and the Khmer who had been accused of having Vietnamese mind.

In this talk, Professor Janet Steele will address the following questions: what has been the experience of other countries in Southeast Asia as they make the transition to democracy? Can independent media help to facilitate this transition? Examples from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Timor Leste suggest that there is a much greater likelihood not only of press freedom, but also a smooth transition to democracy when journalists are independent of the government, and uphold their own best professional standards and practices.

Biography and Prosopography in Cambodian history: Cambodian Ministers at the Time of the French Protectorate (1863-1953)

Abstract:

This lecture is an exploration of Cambodian high society during the French colonial period. It focuses on Thiounn, the « Palace Minister » (1864-1946), a biography. A Study of a social milieu and a prosopography of the Khmer administrative elite at the time of the Treaty of the French Protectorate (1863) until Cambodia’s Independence (1953).

By means of the biography of Samdech Veang Thiounn, the most famous Cambodian Minister during the Protectorate, this research aims at studying and understanding the relationships, practices and cultural values that were at play among members of the Council of Minister.

Drawing on archival materials from the National Archives of Cambodia and the Archives de la France d’Outre-Mer, the methodology used for this historical research is a combination of prosopographical approach (through the notion of network and social relations in the colonial context) and a biographical approach based on individual story-telling in Cambodian society. One of the objectives of this project is to assess how these administrative documents can contribute to a better understanding of the social history of the country.

This talk examines the complex situation of homeless people in Phnom Penh, Cambodia as a consequence of their enmeshment in a new logic of urban governance being effected by city officials and municipal planners.

The author argues that the widespread adoption of free market economics has produced conditions of globalized urban entrepreneurialism, from which Phnom Penh is clearly not exempt. The (re)production of cultural spectacles, enterprise zones, waterfront development, and privatized forms of local governance all reflect the powerful disciplinary effects of interurban competition as cities aggressively engage in mutually destructive place-marketing policies.

In this regard, this talk examines the urban strategy developed by municipal authorities, which directly affects homeless people in Phnom Penh as part of a gentrifying process that the local government has dubbed a ‘beautification’ agenda.Click here to download the lecture slide

Climate Change Mitigation: An Anthropological Analysis

Abstract:

This anthropological analysis will examine the structures and ideas that underlie both the causes of climate change and the mitigation/adaptation strategies envisioned to attend to it. Changing climate will bring with it dramatic changes to human social organization and it is toward these changes that Dr. Work directs her overarching research.

Social transformations ride along the rails of structures and ideas that are already present, altering bits and pieces of the original to accommodate new ideas, new environments, and new organizing structures. Dr. Work’s goal is to begin to critically examine the structures and ideas that underlie the dominant global system currently in transition.

For this presentation, she will limit her discussion to climate change mitigation strategies and present a brief overview of current climate change mitigation options and their global uptake. She will then cover some of the structures, ideas, and values that support the practices currently acknowledged to be causing climate change. A discussion of the successes and challenges of each mitigation option will bring the two earlier points together in conclusion.

Dr. Work will argue that it is time for a new way of thinking about what it means to be human in a living environment and that it is only by thinking about how human-ness is currently conceived that new ways can present themselves.

Unlike restaurants that prepare food on-demand, pre-prepared food venues (or soup-pot restaurants) in Cambodia and other Asian countries make their decisions about what to cook in a more complicated food-society nexus, factoring in their culinary skill, seasonality of ingredients, and diners’ expectations for variety. As such, soup-pot restaurants exist as tenuous brokers between rural food customs and modern expectations of city dwellers. For urban migrants, these familiar locales are an invaluable resource in overcoming the economic and social challenges of transitioning to the city.

For long-time urban dwellers, they are a transparent window into the agricultural and market cycles that they encounter less in the city, as well as an opportunity to re-acquaint with national cuisine. Fulfilling the expectations of rural and urban patrons, however, requires carefully crafting an experience that balances the agricultural and social dynamics of rural eating customs with city comforts. Under good management, soup-pot restaurants can accomplish this while also serving as a space of dietary learning, providing meals that are culturally understood to be balanced and nutritious, while exposing children and adults to culinary diversity. As a site of research, these restaurants can be seen as potential innovators for managing the consequences of industrialization on food and agriculture.Click here to download the lecture slide

Economic Globalization and Economic Challenges facing Cambodia

Prof. Widyono will highlight the global shifts in economic and political power over the last 500 years, starting from colonialism and the industrial revolution to a total domination of the World Economy by the United States after World War II. He will then highlight the dynamic shifts in economic power since the 1980s resulting in China overtaking the United States as the largest economy in the world at the end of 2014. In this connection, Prof. Widyono will highlight the dynamic interplay between the United States and China in the recent summits of APEC in Beijing and the ASEAN and East Asian summits in Myanmar and their implications on ASEAN Economic Integration and on the Cambodian economy in particular.

Dr. Benny Widyono is currently a professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut. He is also an advisor at Leopard Capital Limited partnership and a trustee at the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS) and the People Improvement organization. (PIO) in Cambodia,. Previously, Dr. Widyono served as a United Nations diplomat in Thailand, Chile, New York and Cambodia, In Cambodia he was a peacekeeper with UNTAC from 1992 to 1993, and then returned to Cambodia as the UN Secretary-General’s Personal Representative from 1994-1997. Dr. Widyono published his book “Dancing in the Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia” while he was a visiting scholar at Cornell University. It has been translated into Khmer and Chinese.

Dr. Benny Widyono talks about United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia(UNTAC) in Cambodia

His lecture was on January 13, 2015 at CKS office in Phnom Penh.

Hand and Mouth Games in three provinces of Cambodia An Ethnographic Focus on Sociability between Children by Steven Prigent

This paper is an in-depth study of children’s hand-clapping singing games in three villages of rice growers in Cambodia. In the course of these games, children chant assonant verses while clapping their hands. They play with words and perform special choreographies. When examining one of these games, we are very tempted to study the verbal and gestural scripts and ask what changes in the rhythm that signals the playing out of the game? Furthermore, what do the children talk about during these games and what are the rules?

Each time, we can observe two high points: a period of rhythmic chanting (with hand percussion) and a duel of hands. The chanting can precede the duel or conversely according to the type of game. In all cases, the game finishes with an emotional release: the children playfully hit one another, they pinch and tickle, and they poke one another while laughing.

Life before Expulsion – Community History from Vietnamese Minorities in Kampong Chhnang by Kristina Chhim and LY Rattanak

Ethnic Vietnamese groups have lived and further settled in Cambodia throughout the country’s contemporary times. Nowadays, the Vietnamese are one of the largest minority groups in Cambodia. However, very little data is available about “the Vietnamese” in Cambodia and the diverse subgroups that are subsumed under this category. The aim of this research project is to understand how these communities emerged and evolved in Cambodia and to ultimately generate a more nuanced understanding of their diversity in terms of livelihood, migration history, cultural practices and sense of identity

There were great changes in the Cambodian courts and laws during the years from 1901to 1924. The French Protectorate of Cambodia, with the cooperation of King Sisowath, re-organised Cambodian courts into a hierarchy that resembled that of French courts. Cambodian laws were codified in forms that resembled French legal codes. During that time, judicial and administrative roles were gradually separated.

Socially Engaged Buddhism in Cambodia by Napakadol Kittisenee

This talk will discuss the concept and contemporary influence of Engaged Buddhism, which emerged and spread during the modern period amidst war and violence in mainland Southeast Asia.The presentation will explore the practices and efforts of those adhering to this mode of Buddhism by offering some cases from Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and particularly Cambodia. The talk will consider the history of Khmer monastic movements in the light of Socially Engaged Buddhism as well as the challenges this Buddhist movement poses to established doctrines and oders.

The Cham, Akhar Thrah Scholars and ‘Remembering the Boundaries’ from 1651 to 1969 by William B. Noseworthy

After 11 months archival and field research in Cambodia and Vietnam this talk focuses upon the history of the Cham population in these two states from the period between 1651 and 1969. The first aim of the talk is to explain why these two years are used as the watershed moments of the study. The talk then explains the historical geography of the Cham population, before moving into the major tropes of the history of Cambodia’s largest linguistic minority population. By shifting the emphasis to the history of an ethnic group, to the history of a language community, this talk demonstrates the complexities of Cham social structures that developed in light of the Vietnamese conquest of their territory that was completed by the nineteenth century. In light of this conquest, different communities adapted gradients of religious and cultural practices that were aimed to suit their position in various locations. Across this borderlands region, there was also the development of attempts by ‘state’ authorities also attempted to redraw the lines of the Cham community, with little to no impact in some cases, or, in the most severe cases, resulting in disaster.

Meanwhile, by the 1960s new strategies of institutionalization were adapted by the Cham communities themselves. This presentation argues that the strategy of institutionalization while allowing for diversity was critical to the survival of the Cham culture in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Measuring the vitality of Cambodian music traditions by Dr Catherine Grant

In this Lecture, Dr. Catherine Grant speaks about Music Endangerment and ‘Vitality Framework’, and suggests how it may be relevant to the Cambodian context. First presented in her book “Music Endangerment, How Language Maintenance Can Help” the Music Endangerment and Vitality Framework is the first in-depth model for measuring the strength of music traditions across the world. It is closely based on UNESCO’s international framework for measuring language endangerment. In Cambodia, some music traditions are still endangered while others are being very successfully revitalized. Catherine Grant argues it is important to be able to measure the vitality of Cambodian (and other) music traditions for three reasons: to identify when a tradition is endangered; to make sure the right action is taken to strengthen it; and finally, to allow us to know when efforts to support it are successful. The Music Endangerment and Vitality Framework may help musicians, community members, non-government organizations, cultural policy workers, and others to know how best to support the valuable and beautiful musical heritage of Cambodia.

Student Monks, Temples, Pilgrims and Donors by Prof. John Marston

This talk explores the transnationalism of Cambodian Buddhism by looking at a number of inter-related phenomena taking place since the early 1990s in Sri Lanka and India:
– Cambodian monks pursuing education,
– Buddhist pilgrimage by Cambodian groups,
– the building of Cambodian-style temples,
– and, underpinning all of this, religious donation – by
Cambodians from Cambodia itself as well as the overseas Cambodian community.
The talk asks: to what extent do these transnational processes tell us something significant about the direction of contemporary Cambodian Buddhism?

The great hope of globalization is that it will raise standards of living around the world. The reality shows that, until recently, developing countries continued to suffer from poverty and underdevelopment. Dr. Widyono will highlight the global shifts in power over the last 500 years that have resulted in the so called “BRIC countries” (Brazil, Rus-sia, India, China) gaining tremendous economic strength on the inter-national stage and what effect this has on Cambodia and other poor countries. Looking ahead, the economic prospects for Cambodia continue to be bright. However, Cambodia must strengthen its policies to reduce pov-erty by moving its labour force from subsistence agriculture to an ex-panded manufacturing, construction and service sector base. In this talk Dr. Widyono will highlight the preparation for Cambodia’s inte-gration into the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) in 2015 and what impact this will have.

[Javascript required to view Flash movie, please turn it on and refresh this page]

The Cambodian Women’s Oral History Project on Gender-Based Violence under the Khmer Rouge by Theresa de Langis, PhD – CKS Affiliate Fellow

When the Trial Chamber at the Khmer Rouge tribunal released its strategy for upcoming Case 002/02 on April 4, 2014, it was a huge victory for victims of sexual- and gender-based violence under the regime. As part of its strategy, the Trial Chamber will hear a limited number of cases of rape as part of the charges against Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, rejecting the conclusion of the Office of the Co-Investigative Judges in its closing order that the accused cannot be held liable for these sexual crimes.

The Cambodian Women’s Oral History Project was launched as an independent research project with the aim to correct the historical erasure of women’s experiences of sexualized violence under the regime. With a goal of the collection 20 life-story testimonies
from survivors and witnesses throughout Cambodia, the project recently collected its 18th narrative and is now preparing files for a public access archive. The arc of the total narrative encompasses French colonial rule to the present day, from narrators that
reach from all corners of Cambodia.

The presentation will highlight early findings of the project, and their potential relevance to Case 002/002 in its inclusion of rape. The presentation will also touch on the shared-authority, social-change methodology of the project, and to the significance of life story accounts to gender and genocide globally.